Consider Me Gone
by IluvMonkeys
Summary: Songfic-ish. One-shot on Jenny and Gibbs' last few days in Paris and what finally prompted her to leave. Inspired by Reba McEntire's 'Consider Me Gone'.


Consider Me Gone

Inspired by:

Hollis (Much as I hate to admit it) - "You should want me."

Reba- Consider Me Gone (hmm…imagine that)

A/n: I hadn't even planned to post this one here, not really; but I couldn't decide between two endings, so I posted one on tumblr and one on FF. :P

Hope you like it lovelies :)

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It was a nagging thought months before: when he had replied in jest, "That'll be the day," to her abrupt "I love you" but an "I love you" just the same. She knew when she got her orders and she didn't tell him for fear he would tell her to take them, and by the time she left the coat he had bought her with a tear-stained letter in the pocket on the plane she was sure.

He didn't love her, not like she loved him. She knew him: he was a serial monogamist who had a thing for redheads; and she'd be damned if she ended up like the rest of them. She had a plan. She had almost been stupid enough to throw it away for him. Almost.

She had asked him when she got her orders what he would do if he woke one morning and she was gone.

"_Come after you_," he'd said; but in her letter she had asked him not to.

Not because she didn't want him to. It was because she _did_. If he came after her she would probably fall into his arms like some swooning daffodil of a womanl, and that was not who Jennifer Shepard was.

This man who had her acting like some lovesick puppy was infuriating and boorish and downright anti-social; but for some reason she loved him. How she figured that she didn't know. She barely knew him, not really.

Any time their conversations broached anything deeper than the weather she could feel even more than see him shutting down; and when she even thought to demand an explanation for his silence it "wasn't the time." When he woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night he was always "fine." He shook her off; and she knew better than to try to go after him.

He was charming and pretty to look at; and their arguments were foreplay to some of the best sex she had ever had in her life; but _love_ wasn't the right word for whatever it was he felt for her. That much was obvious; and it had been their last argument that locked her decision to leave him into place.

_She had sat up in the living room of their little Parisian apartment after hours of pacing and convincing herself that she wasn't worried, with her knees drawn up to her chest and chewing on her last nail when he walked in the door drenched in rain water. He had gone out for bread and milk at her request eight hours ago._

"_What're you still doin' up?" he had asked breezily with his signature lopsided smirk as he headed into the bathroom presumably to get a towel._

"_Where were you?" she had asked from the doorway when she found him there shirtless and rubbing his hair dry._

"_Caught a lead, decided to check it out," he said, turning on the shower head._

"_You said fifteen minutes," she reminded him; and the hard edge to her voice made him pause in undoing his belt to turn to her. She glared at him mildly with her arms crossed over her chest._

"_I caught a lead, Jen," he reasoned. "It was good. It'll help the agent who takes up where we left off."_

"_You said that," she snapped harshly; and her left eye twitched slightly. "I am your partner, Jethro. You can't tell me you're going to the store for fifteen minutes and not check in for eight hours. This assignment is almost over. I should be able to trust you by now."_

"_Trust me?" he demanded, narrowing his eyes at her defensively. "We have a job to do here, Jen. You should trust me to do that."_

"I do_," she shot back. "But I _don't _trust you with me. I should be able to do that too."_

"_Jenny, come on," he groaned, having the decency to look thoroughly guilty._

"_You scared me, Jethro," she admitted, though her anger canceled out most of the vulnerability of her statement. "Even if you don't have the decency to let me know when I'm getting fucked again you could at least give me the professional respect I deserve," she snarled acridly, storming out of the bathroom._

"_What're you tryin' to say, Jen?" he called after her, stepping out into the hallway; and she stopped, spinning to face him._

"_I'm saying learn the rules of common courtesy, Gibbs," she shot back. "If someone is waiting for you, and you won't be on time, a call is warranted."_

"_I never told you to wait up for me, Jen," he reminded her, knowing he was venturing into dangerous territory the moment she called him Gibbs. "This is an undercover, off the books assignment. Sometimes there isn't time for common courtesy," he growled. "What don't you get about that, Jen?" he demanded incredulously. "You still act like some probie half the time."_

"_God, are you blind, or deaf, or just stupid?" she snapped. She leaned heavily on the small table in the foyer where they stood. "This isn't about a working relationship." _

_Recognition registered before she saw his eyes harden. _

"_Not now, Jenny," he sighed; and she let out a wry snort with a brief, disbelieving smile before her face hardened in anger. _

_She threw the nearest thing to her in a flash of rage: a plate left over from the apple she had been eating when he left. "Damn it, Jethro!" she shouted. "Would you say something? Would you just be honest with me for once? Don't you think you owe that to me?"_

_He stared at her blankly; and she inhaled with a curt nod._

"_Fine," she sighed; and turned on him, heading up the stairs, leaving the shattered remains of the plate in the floor like the broken relationship he should have seen it for then. _

_He stood there a minute before he managed to muster the common sense to go after her._

"_What are you doing, Jen?" he asked as she slipped on a pair of jeans too calmly for the argument they had just had._

"_Going out," she replied just as calmly, tying her hair up at the nape of her neck before she grabbed her purse off of the bed. _

"_Where?" he growled testily._

"_Out," she snapped harshly like an errant teenager, striding past him only to have him pull her back by her arm._

"_You're not going," he said, knowing she was doing it out of a petulant need to get back at him. She was being reckless. Recklessness and undercover work never boded well._

"_Excuse me?!," Jenny growled lowly; and looked down at his grip on her bicep; and back up at him with brows raised in warning. "Let go, Jethro," she said._

"_No," he refused; and she tried to snatch her arm out of his grip only to have him tighten it._

"_Jethro," she said. "Let go of me, now."_

"_You go out there; and you'll get your cover blown," he warned; and he narrowed his eyes at the sad look of hurt that flashed across her eyes, loosening his grip just enough for her to snatch her arm free._

"_Don't wait up," she murmured, brushing past him with a sharp edge in her voice._

_When she had come back hours later, shutting the door behind her quietly and made her way up the stairs to the bedroom she had found him sitting there on the bed, staring at the door. For some reason, she had the feeling that was all he had been doing since she left. _

"_You should've showered," she said simply, trying to hide the slight tremor in her voice as she stripped down out of her clothes._

"_You can't pull crap like this, Jenny," he said. "I'm your partner. You don't get riled up like this over your partner. You don't wait up all night for your partner."_

"_And yet here you are," she murmured, her green eyes sharp, and unforgiving._

"_Because you're not just my partner, Jen," he snapped, striding across the room, backing her against the wall. "If you can't learn to separate the two, then this won't work."_

"_Good thing I'll be out of your hair in two weeks then," she shot back; and he growled at the back of his throat._

"_That's not what I meant, Jen, and you know it."_

_Jenny was the only woman he had actually been afraid of losing since Shannon. He felt his heart stop every time she walked out of the door in a rage; and he only managed to relax when she crawled back into bed next to him. He liked the way she smelled: like cinnamon and vanilla and expensive French perfume. He liked the way she scrunched her nose up when she was annoyed, and the way she bit her lip when she was thinking, and he really liked the way her skin flushed when she was angry. She even managed to make him laugh, really laugh for the first time in years. Leroy Jethro Gibbs loved Jennifer Shepard; but he could never bring himself to say the words. He never even managed to tell her about Shannon and Kelly. He had come close a few times; but every time he did he got the nagging feeling that she would run. It was what she was good at: running; and she was the one thing in his life he couldn't stand to lose. _

"_Do I really?" she asked skeptically._

_Jenny would pick flight over fight any day; but she would sure as hell pick fight over fright. She didn't like to be left vulnerable, and Jethro made her feel vulnerable. He made her want to kiss him and punch him in the mouth at the same time. Either way he never failed to evoke some sort of passionate response from her; and that scared her. She felt like he had taken her heart without ever consulting her and now he was holding it hostage. She had been careful never to let any man ever have that power over her, but Jethro-Jethro had blindsided her. She had always found him attractive; but she had never expected to feel anything more for him than a tingling below the belt. She hadn't expected him to get into her head and under her skin. She hadn't expected him to do that and then manage to brush her off like a piece of lint on his pants in any encounter other than in the bedroom._

"_You should," he growled._

"_I guess we're at a crossroads then," she whispered. "What would you do, Jethro, if you woke up tomorrow morning and I was gone?"_

"_You planning to leave?" he asked, staring hard into her green eyes._

"_I'm asking you a question," she shot back, her emerald orbs boring back into his blue eyes. "What would you do? And don't you dare tell me 'not now'."_

"_Come after you," he answered without hesitation; and that would have convinced her; but Rene Benoit had found her that night and if she wanted Rene Benoit that meant leaving Jethro. He may as well have considered her gone then because Jenny _wanted _Rene Benoit._

"_Do you promise?" she asked; and Jethro smirked, not knowing the implications behind her words._

"_Yeah, Jen."_

So now, she sat on a plane to Tel Aviv, knowing Jethro would soon find her coat and the letter in the pocket. She stared out of the window as the engine whirred to life and hot tears blurred her last vision of Paris at dusk as the wheels lifted off of the ground. She exhaled a shaky breath as those tears spilled over her cheeks; and she rested her head against the window as the sun rose over the horizon, turning the rain drops on her window into diamonds. She cried because she realized she had made a terrible mistake; and she cried longer because she knew it was too late to fix it.

Meanwhile, Jethro sat on the plane she was supposed to be on with her coat in the seat next to him-Jenny's seat. He was angry and bitter because she hadn't had the decency to face him when she said good-bye; but he was angrier because she still managed to make him want to go find her. He snatched up the simple white parchment, glancing at her elegant scrawl written in black ink, marred by a few tears here and there, more toward the end.

_Dear Jethro,_

_I did love you, I still do; but there's no need to drag this on. We're both married to the job. I guess I never should have expected anything more than what it was, but I did. That's my fault though. Someday soon you'll forget about me, or maybe you'll hate me. I don't know. I do know that eventually I'll just be another redhead in the lineup. I'll be nothing more than a memory, a part of your past. You once promised me if I ran you would come after me. Don't. Give it time and I'll just be a smile in an old photograph. Consider me gone, forget I was ever a part of your life; just don't come after me. Don't try to find me. This is for the best. I have to do what's best for me. No matter what happens we'll always have Paris._

_Jenny_

He wanted to hate her. He wanted her to hurt like he hurt right now, but if the tears on the paper were any indication, she already was. She had been hurting. He had hurt her. She had told him not to come after her; but her forewarnings had never stopped him from doing anything before. He didn't want her to turn into just another woman in some forgotten photograph. He wanted new pictures. He wanted wedding pictures. He even wanted baby pictures; but it was too late for that now. She was gone; and he realized he should have considered her so two weeks ago. She had been off since then; and he should have seen this coming. He should have, but he didn't.

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Ironically, this song is ruined for me now after listening to it so many times in the past few days while I wrote this; and my sister will throw things at me now if I play it.

Thanks for reading :) Reviews are always much appreciated

xoxo-Monkeys :)


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